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User blog:Orgodemir27/And All I'll Need Is Your Hate...
“Sir, I think this man is beyond our healer’s assistance… “Yes, he’s dead. Congratulations, you pass the introduction to medicine course.” “Then…I’m afraid I don’t understand…” “Here’s a scroll of Raise Dead, here’s a hundred for your healer’s time. I sincerely hope you can figure out the rest.” “OH. Oh, yes, bring him in here...Might I ask, how did he die? There are no marks on his body, he does not appear to have fallen from illness…” “That’s not your concern.” “Who is he?” “That’s not your concern either. Just get the healer. I have other things to do today.” “Um, yes, yes right away.” Ugh. Backwater towns... An elderly man, clothed in plain brown robes, placed the piece of parchment he was reading from gently atop the corpse lain across the bed in front of him as he intoned the last of the otherwise-meaningless words of the spell. A faint glow illuminated from the ink, shimmered across the diamond dust that coated the paper, and vanished, leaving a blank scrap in its wake that fell to the floor. The previously still form twitched, tentatively at first, then violently, rocking back and forth. The old man watched, a hint of fear and wonder playing at his face; he had never seen the dead rise before, and certainly never expected to bring someone back himself. Suddenly, the half-orc shot up, like someone awakening abruptly from a terrible dream, panting and sweating. His eyes darted about his bed madly until they fell upon his hand, which he stared at with vehemence, opening and closing his fist like it was something new. His breathing slowed, not due to relaxation, but from what seemed to be his dawning realization that he WAS breathing, and was quickly coming to resent every breath he had to draw. His fist clenched as his eyes narrowed, “Why…am I alive?” It was not a query but a demand, and his gaze slowly moved over to the old man, who quivered under the fury of the glare. He dithered as the half-orc stared, waiting for an answer that he couldn’t give. “Because frankly, this was expensive enough. If you so badly want to be a lich again, you can pay for it yourself,” a dry voice commented from the room’s far corner. The orc’s gaze whipped over, and he saw a third figure in the room: a thin half-elf man, approaching middle age, with a sardonic expression and an old burn scar across the bridge of his nose. His eyes widened with surprise, then narrowed with a guttural fury; he had aged, but it was certainly still him, the arrogant obnoxious vermin who had plagued him in the past. “You can leave, you’re done here,” Rinzler said flippantly to the elder, waving him off-handedly towards the door. The old man looked from one man to the other, a worried expression plain in his eyes, and he scurried to the door, unwilling to get further involved in whatever it was that was going on here. The half-orc glared venomously, his anger and confusion rendering him momentarily mute. Rinzler gave him a moment, his expression amused, then added, “I did tell you that I would bring you back, and I don’t make a habit of lying. Terrible at it, not much point, but I will say that even I’m disappointed with how fast I got bored.” The orc glared, and sputtered, “I…will KILL you.” Rinzler laughed, standing up from the wall the he had been leaning on. “Well, of course, that’s the whole point! But I sincerely hope you can do more than that!” This confused the half-orc more, and so he continued, “Everywhere. I have been just about everywhere. Not just Laurasia, but Rodinia too, and all of the little islands in between. Certainly, I haven’t finished with them in depth yet, but I’ve seen enough, enough to know that there isn’t anyone, ANYONE worth rivaling in this whole bloody ignorant population.” He spun about, his hands fiddling and gesturing wildly as he monologued, addressing the room as much as the other man. “It doesn’t matter what I learn, what techniques I perfect, what I create, because there is no one alive with enough knowledge to even fully comprehend what I can do, let alone appreciate it, and certainly no one to find the flaws, the mistakes, the gaps and holes and missing numbers, and even if there is someone, then they are hiding or on another plane, making their existance quite moot, and if there’s no one to test my work against, then what’s the point of doing anything, since everything will be left an untested theory? But I won’t stop, can’t stop, because then I might as well be dead, and since you obviously chose to come back to life, we can both agree that anything is better than death.” He turned towards the bed and approached it, his voice gaining a pointed insistance, “You, you’re the only one who is even close, so I want to see what you can do, now that your two setbacks are gone…” “You…you ignorant filth!” the half-orc interrupted. He tried to stand, but his limbs gave way, their strength not yet fully returned. “You presume to be on my level?! Three hundred years of research, and you think you can speak like you could hold a candle to me?!” “Right now? Yes. Back then? Yes,” he said, if anything garnering a sadistic pleasure from the orc’s surmounting anger. “But like I said, you had handicaps. Beyond, of course, your own short-sightedness and idiocy.” The orc twitched at the juvenile jab. “They are, of course, your servitude and complacency. You have always served someone. Always an apprentice, never the master. First the old orc, then the Necromancer, always kneeling and working for someone better than you. Of course, they’re gone now, which leaves you with the options of serving yourself or me, and frankly I’m not particularly good with students.” The orc growled fiercely at the suggestion, but Rinzler talked over him, “And as far as your complacency, well, you’re not immortal now, you don’t have a master and a bunch of powerful accomplices to hide behind as you toddle about at your own pace, wasting a hundred years doing what could be done in a month. I will be watching you, provoking you, trying you, and making you reach that potential that you’re apparently too lazy to reach on your own. And in doing so I will have a goal, and someone that can beat me at my work, my study, my game.” He leaned down towards him, and continued, “And all I have to do is keep making you hate me, because as long as you do, you won’t stop wanting me ruined and dead, and you will provoke me and underscore my faults in turn, keeping me alert and forcing me to become better. You won’t choose death, you never have. You won’t forgive me, because neither of us do. So you’ll hate me, and fight me, and the only question of who on this planet we’ll surpass is which of us will beat the other.” “So, you think that you can make me hate you forever?” the half-orc asked, quietly and venomously. “Pfft. You? Yes. Yes, I know exactly how you hate, why you hate, because it’s the same hate I have, and once again I thank you for it, because after having to listen to wishy-washy ideals and ill-conceived stupidity, I admit to thrilling at the thought of actually empathizing with something.” Rinzler taunted, bringing his face closer, “Make you hate me forever? There’s nothing easier in the whole world”. The orc’s hand suddenly whipped out from his side, grabbing the half-elf’s neck brutally, clenching it with every ounce of strength he could muster. “You’d have to live longer than this,” he hissed, spitting. Rinzler coughed and gasped for a second, then choked out a laugh. In a flash, a scalpel was in his hand, previously hidden within his sleeve, and his hand was on the orc’s wrist, the blade slicing neatly through his tendons. With a yell, he released him, the shock of pain strikingly unpleasant after three hundred dull years of undeath. In the same motion, Rinzler grabbed the orc’s face and brought it to his, his lips pressing roughly against the other’s. It lasted only a second. “Nothing. Easier.” Rinzler whispered, then stood up and turned away, leaning towards a window. “Ugh. I have a meeting shortly,” he confirmed to the silver watch he pulled from his pocket. “You can have this back, incidentally. I don’t need it, and I neither of us want you wasting time getting your act together,” his hand waved towards a book that had been left on the table: the orc’s compilation of formulas and research, lost to the elf when he had fallen in the Bone Ziggurat decades ago. The orc said nothing, revulsion and fury rendering him nearly comatose, staring at space and twitching with rage. Rinzler headed towards the door, when he stopped, remembering something, “Oh, I suppose I should ask, what’s your name? ‘The Fifth’ obviously isn’t viable anymore, and calling you ‘Fool’ is only amusing if it isn’t actually your name.” There was a pause, then the orc raised his head slowly to glare with utter hatred at the elf. “I am the sector. I will peel you apart, fibre by fibre, nerve by nerve, until there is nothing left but the agony that will follow you to oblivion.” Rinzler smiled sarcastically, “Start somewhere that’s not my head this time, hmm? Otherwise I miss out on seeing what my organs look like…unless you want to set up some mirrors.” With that, he turned and left, leaving the other man sitting weakly, furiously on the church room’s bed. A few days later and hundreds of miles away, Rinzler sat down and began copying text, books stacked up high on either side of him. It would be mindless work for most, but he wasn’t copying to create a duplicate; he was memorizing every word of the book, and the writing merely helped focus his mind to the task. Suddenly, he paused, a faint tingle in the back of his mind warning him of incoming magics. In a second, a message began playing within his mind, the product of a Sending spell. The voice was of an older woman, her tone kind and well-meaning, “Sorry if I’m interrupting. It’s Jura. I was checking in earlier, and noticed you were smiling. I’m glad; it’s been awhile. Did something good happen?” The tingling remained after the speech finished: the spell waited for a reply. He paused for a moment in confusion, then in thought; he chuckled to himself. He considered his words, and replied, “I suppose it was a while. I met with someone I hadn’t seen in a long time. I look forward to working with them again.” The tingling faded as the message was sent, and he returned to his work. It was not long before the tingling returned. “That’s great to hear! I worry about you sometimes, you know. I’m glad you have friends where you are. Is it someone I know of?” Rinzler considered this for a moment before replying, “No one whose name you’d know.” He laughed through his nose and carried on with his business. He was working faster though, he noticed, and the pervading tedium that had plagued him for years was lessened. He smiled; it was good to have an adversary again. Category:Blog posts Category:Reflection Category:Epilogue Category:Blog posts